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(Please click here for this same blog but with a picture quiz added. Please do NOT post hereinbelow any comment relating to the picture quiz. Thank you.) A slow start, but it turned out all right. Thank you to Commoner. Definitions are underlined in the clues.

We always look forward to the challenge of an Anax prize puzzle and this was definitely a challenge! However, we’re not wildly enthusiastic about long anagrams and this puzzle has eight fifteen-letter answers, three of which are anagrams and two more have anagrams within the solutions, so this took the edge off the challenge to a certain extent.

Knut made his debut only the other day. Now he appears again, and much of this continues the good start he made. There is a lot I don’t understand; my temptation is to say that some of the clues are a bit weak or unsound, but I don’t dare to because it’s far more likely that I’m missing things.

It’s a very strange grid — perfectly OK and no solecisms with the checking. Was this, together with the large number of clues, done in order to fit in some theme? If it was then I can’t see it.

I found this one quite tough, not least, I feel, because of the high frequency of 4-letter entries. I solved clues steadily but didn’t really feel that I was breaking the back of the puzzle until towards the very end of the solve. In the end, I was left with the clue at 3 (not surprisingly, one of the 4-letter words), which I feared I wouldn’t be able to solve, but I went away and came back and could then see how the clue worked.

What new is there to say about Dac? Every clue tells a little story. I have misgivings about ‘provided’ as an anagram indicator in 4dn, and I suspect that there might be a typo in 12dn, since my suggestion is so simple that I can’t see why Dac didn’t do it that way (although now that I look more closely he may be right all along, the two words necessitating a verb without s; not sure about this — perhaps someone who knows about these things could drop in and tell us); but a small price to pay for a day of Dac.